by AD Davies
If the Man in Tan was still alive—and his lack of a body and quick reactions from Umbrella Man indicated a good chance of that—he knew what happened to Sarah and Gareth. If I allowed events to play out organically, the pair could well end up dead, and my only advantage would turn to stone beneath my feet.
I checked Sammy’s gun, raindrops bouncing off the matt-black automatic. The turncoat pimp had already cocked it, so I did not mess around with the mechanism. I held it away from my body in a one-handed grip, so much heavier than I expected, a solid mass of metal. Then I slid down over the edge on my belly, searching for answers.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I barely noticed the rain easing to drizzle as the ground leveled out and I found a thick shrub to hide behind. Since the gunfire ended, all was silent except for distant rumbles of receding thunder. I listened for the two men.
Then movement flashed to my right. I whipped the gun around, but it behaved like a pendulum. For a tenth of a second I acknowledged I was the world’s worst person to be in possession of a firearm, but caught sight of Umbrella Man dashing behind a mound with the Man in Tan now caked in mud. I ran from the shrub and dived behind another heap of earth about thirty yards from the two men. I held the gun in my good hand and rested it on the shallow muddy dune.
Aimed as best I could.
Braced for the recoil.
I saw movement again and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked, the barrel roared, and smoke belched. The stench of burning powder rushed up my nose. My ears rang. I had no idea if I hit anything.
Four shots replied.
I lay flat, the bullets gouging out lumps of wet muck. I remained stock-still, on my back, looking up at fast-moving clouds. Until that point, I’d been acting on sluggish instinct. Stay alive. Fight. Do whatever it takes. Even shoot a fellow human being. But the barrage I narrowly avoided slammed my brain into a place that concentrated my thoughts, and strength surged through my limbs. I perceived not only the clouds roiling high above, but the mound I was using as cover, and its size and shape suddenly struck me as dreadfully coffin-like. I risked a peek toward Umbrella Man and ducked back as he squeezed off two more shots, but not before I confirmed my horrible suspicion.
The dirt they were using as cover was shaped almost identically to mine. Another loomed behind me, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw deeper into the quarry. More mounds became clear. I counted another five before a report rang out and I flattened myself on the ground.
I pointed the gun in their direction without aiming and fired. Again. Again.
There was no return fire. I told myself I’d count to ten and then risk another visual check.
One … two … three …
I gripped the gun.
Six … seven … eight …
I readied myself and—
Fast moving sloshing sounded. I looked over the mound.
Having cleared the distance, Umbrella Man dived forward and tackled me with his massive arms. The gun went flying and we both splashed into the soft ground. I tried to roll with the momentum but he had me in a bear hug. I struck with my elbows and knees at every part of his body I could reach, but it was like battering clay. He pummeled a fist into my ribs and blew the wind out of me. Unable to take a breath, I head-butted him. His nose crunched and he reared back. It made him madder. He gripped my neck, thrust me deeper into the mud. Blood gushed from his nostrils, teeth bared and bloodied. His free arm prepared a huge punch that I knew would end me in this fight.
Last chance. So small. Probably wouldn’t do anything.
I had to try.
In that split-second, I reached for the man’s waistband. Grasped my cosh. I pulled it out and held it two-handed in the path of his fist. The wood splintered but, due to the lead lining, it did not break completely. His knuckles shredded and the diversion sent the blow past my face. It was enough. As he cried out again, I twisted in the mud and he tipped over.
Then I hit him. I used what remained of my cosh at first, one blow after another—his face, his legs, his body—and when the wood finally gave up and crumbled off the lead inner, I hit him with my fist. It hurt, even in my frenzied state, but I did it anyway. Over and over, I pummeled his head and I pummeled his body, the soft spots that drop the strongest of men if you strike just right. I kept going, even when he ceased moving.
A hand on my shoulder squeezed gently.
“I think you have slain him,” Vila Fanuco said.
I sat back on my haunches. Umbrella Man’s nose was obliterated and both eyes had already swollen, one of them shut completely, and there were gaps in his blood-filled mouth. No telling what was going on under the bone, beyond the muscle where his organs lay.
Fanuco was all in black, boasting a flak-jacket accessory, with night-vis goggles raised to the sky. He wielded a shotgun, with a knife and automatic handgun holstered on his hip. He carried it all off as naturally as I did a Hugo Boss suit.
I breathed there for a while, listening to feet on mud, to people dragging others around and barking orders in French and in English. Wide, powerful beams of light swung into play and my fatigue lifted some. I used my hands to heave myself to my feet, then straightened slowly, unsteady but upright.
Off-roaders guarded the lip of the quarry, shining massive torches to illuminate the basin. Shrubbery had taken over much of the land but it was clear that more of those mounds dotted the floor. The level we were on was flat, but further out it sloped sharply down again, into places I could not see.
Fanuco stood over the Man in Tan, who knelt at his feet, shotgun at his head. His hands were bound by electrical ties. To one side, a man I’d never seen before, in a bomber-jacket and carrying a rifle on his back, dragged a body down the incline by its foot.
I pushed through the drizzle toward Fanuco, the ground sucking at my feet. “Who is he?”
“This is Dac Kien Anh,” Fanuco said. “He is in charge of the men on the street in Paris. A ‘gang-master’, you call him in Britain.”
Anh whimpered. A bullet-wound oozed from his shoulder, a souvenir from the initial foray atop the quarry. Now I’d calmed some, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
I gripped his chin and forced him to look at me. “What happened to the girl I’m looking for?”
He said, “I … cannot…”
Fanuco racked the shotgun as punctuation, and the gang-master tried to pull away. I held firm and asked through gritted teeth, “What happened?”
Bomber Jacket arrived, his manner gruff and to-the-point as he awaited instructions from Fanuco. He dumped what I’d taken to be a corpse in the mud, but it had actually been patched up with a field dressing and was breathing fitfully.
Sammy LeHavre.
Fanuco knelt beside him, seemingly forgetting Dac Kien Anh. He said, “Sammy, Sammy,” and shook his head, truly disappointed. “I was ready to give you your own team.”
Sammy could barely speak. “Vila…” His breath caught, coughed speckles of blood onto Fanuco’s face. “S-sorry.”
Fanuco wiped himself. “You thought these people were growing strong?”
Sammy nodded.
Fanuco said, “You thought they would beat me.”
Sammy nodded again, fast, panicked. “Sorry … I will help—”
I was still holding Anh’s chin when Fanuco rose slowly and deliberately, and aimed the shotgun. He pulled the trigger and blew a hole the size of a grapefruit in Anh’s back. The exit wound was even bigger, blood and bone and shredded organs exploding over my legs. I jumped back, letting out a brief scream.
Fanuco pointed the shotgun at Sammy. The hot barrel hissed in the light rain as Anh’s body tipped forward. Fanuco beckoned me toward Sammy.
He said, “You would not have made him talk. They are conditioned well in their country. But this … worm … he will talk.”
Sammy cringed. “Please…”
“It was me,” I said.
“You?” Sammy said. “What you mean, you?”
“I called Mr. Fa
nuco. When I knew it was you who had Sarah’s phone. I knew what he’d do to you, and I knew I’d lose sleep about it. But if you’d just told me what I needed to know … you are responsible for what he does to you now.”
Fanuco placed the barrel on Sammy’s forehead. His skin reddened immediately.
Sammy shut his eyes tight. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.”
I tried to convince myself that he’d left me no choice, but when I faced the stricken body of Umbrella Man, I wondered if that were true. I could have gone another direction. I could have done it right. That the man was still breathing was of limited consequence.
“I thought they were more disciplined,” Sammy said. “They don’t take big chances like hurting police. They are not as … brutal.”
I said, “So you agreed to join them instead.”
“To pass information, nothing else. At first. Then they wanted to damage Mr. Fanuco.”
Fanuco said, “Is this why you gave Marie to them?”
I assumed he meant the black woman I’d seen with the Goon.
Sammy nodded, still struggling to speak fluently. “They wanted your favorite.”
“And what of the other girls? Why take them?”
I didn’t know what they were talking about. “Girls” plural?
“They have demand,” Sammy said. “They order for demand.”
I said, “Like shoes or a car.”
“Yes. Like that.”
I couldn’t tell if it was his failing health or if he really felt no shame. I said, “Sarah. What about her?”
“She …” he said. “The man … the British man … he came to me. He wanted documents. Said his were … not good anymore.”
So Gareth had learned a bit in prison.
He continued, “I sent them to Madame Rouge …” the Red Woman … “And she made their documents … but … the man, he wanted more.”
“More?”
“Computer. A computer expert. To crack a code.”
“The pen drive,” I said.
Fanuco perked up at this.
Sammy nodded rapidly. “He said it was better than gold.”
“This drive,” Fanuco said. “What was on it?”
“They did not find out. Because I put them in touch with the Viets. They might help, I think. But they see Sarah and they want her, and—”
A loud WHOOP shattered the air, followed by gunshots. Fanuco whipped around and Bomber Jacket pushed his boss into a crouch, gun ready. Loud speakers blasted quick-fire French into the quarry. I picked out words like “mort” meaning dead, and phrases giving orders.
“You?” Fanuco growled.
“No,” I said. “I swear.”
A helicopter searchlight crashed on overhead, and swung onto our small gathering, casting all of us in a moon-bright spot. A voice I recognized boomed over the speaker.
In English, Pierre Bertrand said, “You are surrounded. Put your hands on your head and you will not be killed.”
Police swarmed down into the quarry, armored like SWAT officers emblazoned with “GIPN,” Paris’s equivalent paramilitary response unit. Others hustled handcuffed prisoners into view and made them lie on their faces high above us. Fanuco’s other men, I assumed.
A second chopper reverberated from the top end and circled as the operation closed in.
Bomber Jacket and Fanuco dropped their weapons and knelt in the dirt, hands on their heads. I leapt at Sammy, grabbed his neck and applied pressure. My face right in his, I said, “What happened? Tell me!”
He grinned. “Look around you, Mr. Detective. Pick one. No, pick two.”
The mounds were spread out over the terrain, dotted seemingly at random, not hidden, no one caring about the state of them. I had no doubt about what they contained.
“Which one?” I yelled over the rotor-wash, now growing in intensity as the helicopter set down.
Sammy kept on grinning. Started to laugh. “Any of them!” he said. “Pick! I do not know. But be happy your search is at an end!”
And he laughed harder and harder, like some villain in a kids’ cartoon. I was about to launch into yet another physical assault, when the clack-clack of a gun being cocked sounded right next to my ear.
“That man is a prisoner,” Gardien Bertrand said. “And you, Mr. Park, if you do not let that man go, will be shot. Choose. Now.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bertrand could not stop grinning as he handcuffed Vila Fanuco. A smidge too tightly, I might add. A second GIPN officer secured Bomber Jacket, who went with him quietly, like a good soldier should. As soon as Bertrand had aimed his weapon at me, my fists had unclenched and the urge to smash them into someone drained away so fast that I knew I blanched. When I raised my hands and assured him I wasn’t going anywhere, and showed him that I was injured, he reluctantly agreed not to restrain me.
The second helicopter, it turned out, was a medevac unit, which landed at the far end of the quarry on flatter ground. The medics treated Umbrella Man first, ascertained he was in bad but not critical condition, then triaged Sammy.
I’d pounded Umbrella Man with all the rage I could muster, but in my weakened state it had not been enough to kill him. Since Harry’s calming influence, I wished my rage-filled revenge-fantasies belonged to another person. Yes, I wanted to hurt those men in Bangkok, and had intended to do so one day, but I am a different person now. Someone who can resist the desire to break those people whom I hate, just because I can. Having reduced Umbrella Man to a mangled lump, I had to ask myself if I had really changed so much. Was it simply a veneer that had slipped?
As more than a dozen GIPN troops roamed the scene, Bertrand cheerfully read Fanuco his French rights, while another chap in a suit and trench coat filmed the entire operation with a camcorder.
To me, Bertrand said, “There will be no hint of improper conduct this time. Fanuco will not even hurt his head getting into a car.” He looked ten years younger than when I first met him. “Merci, Mr. Park. Thank you so much.”
Fanuco’s eyes met mine. It wasn’t me, I wanted to cry.
“What is this?” I asked, as a bearded officer examined me. “How did you—”
“I tracked your phone, Mr. Park. We followed you to L’Hostel Centrale and bugged your car. When our unit picked up that your phone was moving but the car was not … well, we followed you. We are not amateurs at this.”
The medics had secured Sammy to a bright orange stretcher and now ran him to their helicopter.
Over the noise, Bertrand laughed at the sky. “Oh, Mr. Park! When I was married, when I had my first child, my second, my third, when I lost my virginity years earlier, my promotion to become the youngest commissionaire ever in Paris … none of it compares to this. When I die, this … right here … today…” He jabbed a finger toward Fanuco. “This is the part of my life I will remember most fondly.”
I said, “You would have waited until I was dead, wouldn’t you? As long as you got him?”
Bertrand came in close, out of range of the camera’s mic. “I gambled my pension on you. Called in every favor. I knew you had called someone. I guessed it was your friend Vila. And look at you. Dead people everywhere. If even one was killed by you, I will find out.”
My head throbbed from whatever chemical the young men used on that rag, my broken finger ached, and my ribs were certainly bruised, maybe worse.
I said, “All these mounds.” I let him look around. “I think they’re graves. It’s where the Vietnamese gangs took people they killed.”
“Indeed.” Bertrand concentrated on the nearest. “Shallow graves. They start out flat, but gases in the body push up the dirt, then animals burrow in to make them bigger. Eventually, as you see, things grow, and cover them.”
Through the vegetation, the new grass and shrubs and weeds, the medics returned from securing Sammy in the medevac unit. They carried another stretcher for Umbrella Man.
Bertrand nodded grimly. “This is private land. An old farm. This quarry, a compa
ny exploring the ground for minerals, they found nothing and sold the land cheap to a man based in Vietnam.”
“Which man?”
“A shell company. We researched it when your triangulation halted here. Over there,” he said, pointing, “is a house with a basement. There are eight dead Vietnamese, courtesy of your partner.”
Fanuco said, “You will not prove this.”
“Oh, I will,” Bertrand said calmly. “And I will find the people who were held captive in those cells.”
“Cells?” I said.
“In the basement. Blown open with small charges. The prisoners are gone.”
“He saved them.”
“He stole them.” Bertrand gestured to Fanuco. “This man, your savior, he is in competition with the Vietnamese. He does not do this rescue to help. He does it for profit. He takes the people his competition has obtained and sells. Same way this Vietnamese gang would have. He is pure evil, Mr. Park. You should not forget this.”
He seemed satisfied at my stony expression.
Fanuco said, “Adam. Check your phone.”
I waved the bearded officer away and checked my pockets. My phone was still there. Now waterlogged and the glass cracked, it had died, likely on the slide down the quarry.
“Find one that works,” Fanuco said.
“Why?”
Bertrand said, “Stop talking.”
The helicopter’s blades still whipped through the air but the engine whined down.
“No,” I said. “I want to know what he means.”
Fanuco bowed his head, water dribbling off him and forming a puddle on the ground. “Call Harry.”
I held out my hand to Bertrand. “You nearly let me die in order to catch this man. The least you can do is give me your bloody phone.”
He handed over an old-fashioned Samsung. I dialed the 0044 number for the UK plus Harry’s landline, which I memorized many years ago.
Someone picked up after a single ring. “Yes?”
I said, “Jayne?”